A SOUL SIREN RETURNS

Chastity Brown finds her groove on her first album in four years.

BY DAVE STEINFELD

MUSIC»

WALE AGBOOLA

“It takes a broken person to write about broken things” Chastity Brown says casually. “I don’t fucking know.” We’re sitting in Chelsea on the West Side of Manhattan in 90-degree heat, and Brown is telling me about the making of her new album, Silhouette of Sirens. It’s her first studio release over four years, a tasty brew of folk and soul, plus other musical ingredients. When I ask her about the gap between albums, she says, “Oh my God, we need a drink for this! There’s a number of reasons why this has taken so long…We began with the whole idea of control and framework. [But] what that made was a really perfect-sounding [album]. It was too perfect to share with people!” She laughs. “The guys that I play with [are] incredible badasses who are really intuitive. I wanted to showcase what they do live, but also what I do live. So we had to scrap six months of recording and start over. And within that, I realized I needed to write some new songs.”

About Curve

This issue, we chose basketball champion Sue Bird of the
WNBA’s Seattle Storm as our cover girl. This newly out, four-time
Olympic gold medal winner is a lesson in strength, persistence,
and humility. I hope you enjoy Lucy J. Madison’s excellent interview
on page 62. And if Sue Bird isn’t enough to inspire you to support
your favorite team or athlete, be sure to go see Battle of the Sexes,
starring Emma Stone, when it is released nationally on September
22. Battle of the Sexes is about the famous tennis match between
Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King and Riggs played in the
Houston Astrodome, and the match was nationally televised in
1973, long before ESPN and the Tennis Channel